WARNING !!!!
The views and opinions expressed by the author of this blog don't necessarily represent the best interest of our sponsors or management, however we are trying to change this.
This is a FREE SPEECH area and it is quite possible you can and will be offended by something you read here. If you are faint of heart do not continue any further. The author of this blog accepts NO responsibility should you take offense to anything that is written here.

Friday, June 15, 2007

you think your immune to this type of action. I would bet those that are involved thought they were also.

Source:

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data

By John SolomonWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, June 14, 2007; A01

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated thelaw or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data aboutdomestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recentyears, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report inMarch that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national securityinvestigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domesticsurveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officialssaid in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a muchsmaller sampling.

The vast majority of the new violations were instances in whichtelephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mailrecords the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect.The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostlyconcerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents'requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have,according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only twosuch examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.

FBI officials said the results confirmed what agency supervisors andoutside critics feared, namely that many agents did not understand orfollow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements whencollecting personal information with one of the most sensitive andpowerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- theNational Security Letter, or NSL.

Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demandsfor personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance bya judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially easedthe rules for issuing NSLs, requiring only that the bureau certify thatthe records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "toprotect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligenceactivities."

The change -- combined with national anxiety about another domesticterrorist event -- led to an explosive growth in the use of the letters.More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 piecesof information, mostly from telecommunications companies. But with thisgrowth came abuse of the newly relaxed rules, a circumstance firstrevealed in the Justice Department's March report by Inspector GeneralGlenn A. Fine.

"The FBI's comprehensive audit of National Security Letter use acrossall field offices has confirmed the inspector general's findings that wehad inadequate internal controls for use of an invaluable investigativetool," FBI General Counsel Valerie E. Caproni said. "Our internal auditexamined a much larger sample than the inspector general's report lastMarch, but we found similar percentages of NSLs that had errors."

"Since March," Caproni added, "remedies addressing every aspect of theproblem have been implemented or are well on the way."

Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700involved telephone companies and other communications firms providinginformation that exceeded what the FBI's national security letters hadsought. But rather than destroying the unsolicited data, agents in someinstances issued new National Security Letters to ensure that they couldkeep the mistakenly provided information. Officials cited as an examplethe retention of an extra month's phone records, beyond the periodspecified by the agents.

Case agents are now told that they must identify mistakenly producedinformation and isolate it from investigative files. "Human errors willinevitably occur with third parties, but we now have a clear plan withclear lines of responsibility to ensure errant information that ismistakenly produced will be caught as it is produced and before it isadded to any FBI database," Caproni said.

The FBI also found that in 14 investigations, counterintelligence agentsusing NSLs improperly gathered full credit reports from financialinstitutions, exercising authority provided by the USA Patriot Act butmeant to be applied only in counterterrorism cases. In response, thebureau has distributed explicit instructions that "you can't gather fullcredit reports in counterintelligence cases," a senior FBI official said.

In 10 additional investigations, FBI agents used NSLs to request otherinformation that the relevant laws did not allow them to obtain.Officials said that, for example, agents might have requested headerinformation from e-mails -- such as the subject lines -- even thoughNSLs are supposed to be used to gather information only about thee-mails' senders and the recipients, not about their content.

The FBI audit also identified three dozen violations of rules requiringthat NSLs be approved by senior officials and used only in authorizedcases. In 10 instances, agents issued National Security Letters tocollect personal data without tying the requests to specific, activeinvestigations -- as the law requires -- either because, in each case,an investigative file had not been opened yet or the authorization foran investigation had expired without being renewed.

FBI officials said the audit found no evidence to date that any agentknowingly or willingly violated the laws or that supervisors encouragedsuch violations. The Justice Department's report estimated that agentsmade errors about 4 percent of the time and that third parties mademistakes about 3 percent of the time, they said. The FBI's audit, theynoted, found a slightly higher error rate for agents -- about 5 percent-- and a substantially higher rate of third-party errors -- about 10percent.

The officials said they are making widespread changes to ensure that theproblems do not recur. Those changes include implementing acorporate-style, continuous, internal compliance program to review thebureau's policies, procedures and training, to provide regularmonitoring of employees' work by supervisors in each office, and toconduct frequent audits to track compliance across the bureau.

The bureau is also trying to establish for NSLs clear lines ofresponsibility, which were lacking in the past, officials said. Agentswho open counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations havebeen told that they are solely responsible for ensuring that they do notreceive data they are not entitled to have.

The FBI audit did not turn up new instances in which anothersurveillance tool known as an Exigent Circumstance Letter had beenabused, officials said. In a finding that prompted particularly strongconcerns on Capitol Hill, the Justice Department had said such letters-- which are similar to NSLs but are meant to be used only in securityemergencies -- had been invoked hundreds of times in "non-emergencycircumstances" to obtain detailed phone records, mostly without therequired links to active investigations.

Many of those letters were improperly dispatched by the bureau'sCommunications Analysis Unit, a central clearinghouse for the analysisof telephone records such as those gathered with the help of "exigent"letters and National Security Letters. Justice Department and FBIinvestigators are trying to determine if any FBI headquarters officialsshould be held accountable or punished for those abuses, and have begunadvising agents of their due process rights during interviews.

The FBI audit will be completed in the coming weeks, and Congress willbe briefed on the results, officials said. FBI officials said eachpotential violation will then be extensively reviewed by lawyers todetermine if it must be reported to the Intelligence Oversight Board, apresidential panel of senior intelligence officials created to safeguardcivil liberties.

The officials said the final tally of violations that are serious enoughto be reported to the panel might be much less than the number turned upby the audit, noting that only five of the 22 potential violationsidentified by the Justice Department's inspector general this springwere ultimately deemed to be reportable.

"We expect that percentage will hold or be similar when we get throughthe hundreds of potential violations identified here," said a senior FBIofficial, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the bureau'sfindings have not yet been made public.